the idea of this bridge caught the fancy of some crusader, and that he spoke or sang of it on his return to France, and that with the Normans the Brig o' Dread travelled into England. In France also the peasants of Nièvre know of this bridge as a small plank which Saint Jean d'Archange placed between the earth and paradise, and of which they sing:

Pas pu longue, pas pu large

Qu'un ch'veu de la Sainte Viarge,

Ceux qu'savont la raison d' Dieu,
Par dessus passeront,

Ceux qu' la sauront pas

Au bout mourront.

'Not longer, not larger than a hair of the Holy Virgin, those who know the reason of God (or the prayer of God) will pass over those who do not know it, will die at the end.'

it;

From the folk-lore of the peasants this belief in a bridge leading from this to a better world found its way into the folk-lore of medieval theologians, and we read of a small bridge leading from purgatory to paradise in the Legenda Aurea, c. 50 (De S. Patricio), and in other places 1.

Is it not curious to see these ideas either cropping up spontaneously in different parts of the world, or handed on by a real historical tradition from India to Persia, from Persia to Palestine, from Palestine to France, and from France even to Yorkshire? And at the root of all, there is that simple but ineradicable belief that the Human and the Divine cannot be separated for ever, and that as the rainbow bridges. heaven and earth, or as the galaxy shows us a bright way through myriads of stars to the highest Empyrean, there must be a bridge between Earth and

1 Cf. Liebrecht zu Gervasius, Otia imperialia, Hanover, 1856, p. 90.

Heaven, between the soul and God; there must be a Way, and a Truth, and a Life to guide the soul to its real home, or, as another religion expresses it, there must be a faith to take us home, and to make us all one in God. (Cf. St. John xvii. 21.)

I

LECTURE VI.

THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE AVESTA.

General similarities in Eschatological Legends.

MENTIONED at the end of last Lecture a my number of traditions gathered from different parts of the world, and all having reference to a bridge between earth and heaven. Some of these traditions were purely mythological, and were suggested, as it seemed, by actual phenomena of nature, such as the rainbow and the Milky Way. Others, on the contrary, sprang evidently from a moral conviction that there must be a way by which the human soul could return to God, a conviction which, however abstract in its origin, could not altogether resist being likewise clothed in the end in more or less fanciful and mythological phraseology.

When we have to deal with common traditions found in India, Greece, and Germany, we must generally be satisfied if we can discover their simplest germs, and show how these germs grew and assumed a different colouring on Indian, Greek, or German soil. I explained this to you before in the case of the Greek Charites, the Sanskrit Haritas. Here we find that the words are identically the same, only pronounced differently according to the phonetic peculiarities of the Greek and the Sanskrit languages.

The common germ was found in the bright rays of the sun, conceived as horses in the Veda, as beautiful maidens in Greece. The same applies, as I showed many years ago, to the Greek Daphne. Daphne would in Sanskrit be represented by Dahanâ, and this would mean the burning or the bright one. This root dah has yielded the name for day and dawn in German. In Sanskrit it has been replaced by Ahanâ1. There is in the Veda a clear reference to the Dawn dying whenever the sun tries to approach her, and we have a right therefore to interpret the Greek legend of Daphne, trying to escape from the embraces of Phoebus, as a repetition of the same story, that the Dawn, when she endeavours to fly from the approaches of the sun, either dies or is changed into a laurel tree. This change into a laurel tree, however, was possible in a Greek atmosphere only, where daphne had become the name of the laurel tree, which was called daphne because the wood of the laurel tree was easy to kindle and to burn.

The lessons which we have learnt from Comparative Mythology hold good with regard to Comparative Theology also. If we find similar religious or even philosophical ideas or traditions in Greece and in India, we must look upon them simply as the result of the common humanity or the common language of the people, and be satisfied with very general features ; but when we proceed to compare the ideas of the ancient Parsis with those of the Vedic poets, we have a right to expect coincidences of a different and a much more tangible nature.

1 See Hopkins, On English day and Sanskrit (d) ahan. Proceedings of American Oriental Society, 1892.

Peculiar relation between the Religions of India and Persia.

The exact historical relation, however, between the most ancient religions of India and Persia is very peculiar, and by no means as yet fully elucidated. It has been so often misconceived and misrepresented that we shall have to examine the facts very carefully in order to gain a clear conception of the real relationship of these two religions. No religion of the ancient world has been so misrepresented as that contained in the Avesta. We shall therefore have to enter into some details, and examine the ipsissima verba of the Avesta. In doing this I am afraid that my lecture to-day on the Avesta and its doctrines touching the immortality of the soul, will not contain much that can be of interest to any but Oriental scholars. But what I have always been most anxious about, is that those who follow these lectures should get an accurate and authentic knowledge of the facts of the ancient religions. Many people are hardly aware how difficult it is to give a really accurate account of any of the ancient Oriental religions. But think how difficult it is to say anything about the real teaching of Christ, without being contradicted by some Doctor of Divinity, whether hailing from Rome or from Edinburgh. And yet the facts lie here within a very narrow compass, very different from the voluminous literature of the religions of the Brahmanist or Buddhists. The language of the New Testament is child's play compared to Vedic Sanskrit or Avestic Zend. If then one sees the wrangling going on in churches and chapels about the right interpretation of some of the simplest passages in the Gospels, it might seem almost hopeless